Should my event go ahead?
The situation in New Zealand with relation to COVID-19 is changing on a daily basis and as such, the first port of call should be the Ministry of Health's advice for public events and mass gatherings. There is some good information on how to instruct staff and attendees, as well as on how to assess your individual risk. The Ministry's general COVID-19 page has useful info as well.
What do I do if I need to cancel my event?
First, if you have any questions about cancelling your event, please see our help information on cancellations and refunds. This outlines our process for cancelling registrations and handling refunds. Please note that we have a new bulk cancellation process. If you have a large number of attendees that you need to work through, please contact us and we will get that going for you. (See details below.)
Don't forget to check your event's Terms and Conditions; you may need to adjust this to incorporate any COVID-19 information if you haven't done this already.
With regard to fees, given the circumstances, we won't charge you our normal Lil Regie fees for cancelled bookings, but we will still need to charge the 2.75% merchant fee for credit card bookings - as the bank has already charged us most of that, and we do incur some costs in handling the refunds. This invoice for the Lil Regie Fees will be sent through separately.
Postponing events
Another option might be to postpone your event - either to later in the year, or to next year entirely. An advantage of doing this is that everyone still remains registered and you will only need to refund those who specifically ask for it. To do this, just change the dates for your event accordingly. You might need to update details in your confirmation email for new bookings and send out an email to the people who have registered already. You might also chose to highlight the date change in your banner design. Remember to communicate the date change through all your event marketing channels.
If you want to close ticket sales and then reopen them at a later date, you can do that by clicking on the "Live" button and then choosing 'Close ticket sales'. You can reopen them again at any time.
Note that if you do postpone you event, and we have received credit card payments on your behalf, we will still need to retain these until the event has finished.
Processing refunds
It may take a little longer than normal to process the refunds for your cancelled event. We have a bank limit on the total amount of money we can refund back in any one day. We've just increased this substantially, but there may be days where the amount we need to process is higher than our limit. Please be assured we'll be handling refunds as speedily as possible, and in the order we receive them.
Bulk cancellations and refunds
We now have a feature in place where we can close tickets sales, cancel all bookings and set refunds for all credit card payments with one click. If you're fully cancelling and refunding your event, this should save you a lot time and means you won't need to do so for each individual booking. If you'd like to do this, please contact us, as we need to do it for you. Note that all credit cards payments would be refunded in full with the feature.
How can I best send an update to my attendees?
If you are using Mailchimp with Lil Regie, contacting your attendees should be relatively straightforward.
Otherwise, you will want to export your attendee data so you can extract your list of emails. We have a help document with instructions on how to do that.
If you're not sure, or you still want to talk, our team is here to help. Please get in touch with us on Live Help if you have any other questions or concerns.